The day after the election, the Times ran a comparative chart of the personal preferences of the outgoing and incoming governors. Asked how he relaxed at the Governor's Mansion in Albany, David Paterson said: "Reading in the family room."

A few days earlier, Joe Fisch, the state's inspector general, issued his report on the fixing of the state's largest contract ever, the Aqueduct racino franchise, and pointed out how little his three-decade friend Paterson actually reads, or is read to. Peter Kiernan, Paterson's counsel, talked to Paterson about the award of the $3 billion, 30-year contract by phone for 30 minutes -- a minute a year -- while the governor was driving to Poughkeepsie.

More »

By now, you've heard that Governor Paterson more or less made yesterday's "Race to the Cock" day a better news story when he got rather excited talking about New York's bringing home the federal education bacon:

Paterson and Obama have never been close, nor have they ever really supported each other's election efforts. So we can only wonder if Paterson's crediting the President and Secretary Arne Duncan "for coming up with a race to the cock" was a mere slip of the tongue or of Dr. Freud.

You can call it "Race to the Top." Still, here are five reasons we think Paterson was right that yesterday was indeed "Race to the Cock" Day:

More »

The governor and David Johnson

It's a week since Judge Judith Kaye issued her 54-page report exonerating and damning Governor Paterson for his handling of a domestic violence case, and nothing has happened. That's news.

Clemmie Harris, who admitted to Kaye that he tried to kill the complaint, is still the governor's closest aide. Deneane Brown, the key witness who took the fifth, got one state raise that could have been withheld. Paterson is saying he was vindicated. And the governor's running buddy David Johnson remains on the lam, a Fifth Amendment fugitive.
Though the onetime furor over this Halloween horror show is what convinced Paterson to shut down his re-election campaign, he is quoted in the Kaye report as telling the victim, Sherr-una Booker, that it would "blow over."

In a strange and disturbing way, he was belatedly right.

More »

David Paterson would have you believe that he did the only responsible thing by vetoing almost 7,000 appropriation bills passed by his former Democratic colleagues in the Legislature. He is even taking a veto victory tour, sustained by the fact that the Republican minority in the State Senate, which he spent most of his career trying to defeat, now has his back and will kill an override.

Actually, only one other governor, South Carolina's GOP headline grabber Mark Sanford, who at first rejected the stimulus money altogether, vetoed a budget because it lacked a contingency plan if the Medicaid funding dies. Paterson and Sanford will both soon depart office awash in personal scandal.

More »

The recently passed Bloomberg and state legislative budgets each contained precisely the same, optimistic assumption that New York would get hundreds of millions of additional federal Medicaid funds even though the bill to provide the windfall was stalled in Congress.

The Daily News said Bloomberg's budget met "the test of responsible governance" and "puts to shame their supposed superiors in Albany," while simultaneously condemning the legislature for "recklessly dismissing the need to adopt a contingency plan that addresses the likely loss" of the Medicaid money. The News never noted that Bloomberg has no contingency plan either, and that his budget counts on getting nearly $300 million of this funding this year and again, next year.

But that's just where the paradox starts.

More »

Taking a breather from the thousands of vetoes he has yet to sign, Governor David Paterson spent three hours last night at B Bar and Grill, right across the street from the Village Voice, drawn, no doubt, by our recent paeans to his wondrous Albany performance.

Paterson enjoyed a bottle of wine, starting around 8 p.m., with his former top aide Charles O'Byrne, a regular at the bar's Tuesday-night Beige gay party, before the two were joined by a second ex-aide who's gay, Sean Patrick Maloney, and other friends. According to one source at the get-together, Paterson was dining with LGBT leaders including Brian Ellner, who recently lost a bid to head the Empire State Pride Agenda.

More »

Unnoticed amid all the breathless salutes to Tough Guy David Paterson, who is supposedly standing up to legislative extravagance, was a press release the governor put out yesterday. It announced a rescue plan for North General Hospital, a sponge for millions in special state financing that once employed Paterson's wife Michelle and retained his father Basil as its outside lobbyist.

More »

Governor David Paterson's dramatic budget cuts to state parks includes a severe hit to a park he once blocked traffic to create.

Back in 1988, then-State Senator Paterson joined environmental activists to block the West Side Highway as a way to protest the stench reeking from the North River Wastewater Treatment Plant that had been built in the Hamilton Heights neighborhood of Harlem three years earlier. Paterson's protests helped convince the state to spend $53 million over five years to reduce the stink coming out of plant - including the construction of Riverbank State Park on top of it to hold the smell down.

More »

Crack problem: Tenants next door to construction of Museum for African Art can feel their whole world falling apart.

When Charlie Rangel, Eliot Spitzer, David Paterson and other bigwigs broke ground on Fifth Avenue for the new Museum for African Art in September 2007, they didn't know that their shovels would cause such damage.

Tenants living next door, scared by a huge and ominous five-story-high crack in their apartment building, have filed suit in housing court, saying the museum construction poses a threat to their lives.

More »

Governor Paterson has hopped on the blog train with Straight Talk, Straight Answers, which would be far more interesting if it were called Crooked Talk, Crooked Answers, but we suppose that sort of thing doesn't fly in Albany. The governor and senior administration officials say they will use it to "respond directly to the questions, concerns and suggestions posted by New Yorkers."

More »